Hardware

My familiarity with Macintosh came relatively late in life. Our first computer was a Commodore PET, which my father, a math teacher, borrowed from his school. It was replaced by an IBM PC Jr, then a PS/2. My dad taught me some Turbo Pascal, and then that was it. We never got another computer. We were a DOS house, and I barely saw a GUI until 1995, when I left for college.

I had seen a few Macs, but most of them were very old. So when I got to college and saw my friend Seth’s PowerMac 7100/66, I was shocked. The screen is so big! It has color! It does things other than print layout! I was hooked. I bought a Mac within weeks. My dad thought I was nuts.

These were the days when built-in Ethernet was largely unheard of, and yet Macs had them. Most computers in the dorm didn’t even have a modem. The World Wide Web was just starting to become a phenomenon. The Yahoo! homepage was a grey, HTML 2.0 mess. There was no spam.

We didn’t just have Ethernet, though. We had AppleTalk. Every Mac user in every dorm was a click away, and not only could we share files, but through a System 7  Chooser extension called BroadCast, we could message each other in realtime. It was IM before IM.

Then, of course, there was Marathon, which also supported AppleTalk. We badged our BroadCast usernames with |M| so complete strangers would know who was up for a game.“M?”“Sure”“Join”

So here we were in 1995 playing spontaneous eight-man networked deathmatches. Every night. All night. People came to our doors asking us to turn the volume down — and to stop screaming at each other.

But for me, it was more than games and chats and word processors and desktop pictures and custom icons. I wanted to understand why Apple thought RISC processors were better than CISC. How those menus and windows got on the screen. How I could make my own. And so I started flunking classes because I was too busy coding for no discernible reason. At that point, my father, bless him, said “I think you need to make a decision.” I went into college an aspiring veterinarian. I came out an aspiring software developer. The rest is, well, now I’m where I am.

The Mac made me excited about technology again. It changed and shaped my life in just about every way.

A few years after I graduated, I found a position at Apple that matched the skills I had scraped up to that point. Mac OS X had just been released, and Apple was still losing money. One of the interviewers (who is still there today) asked me, “How do you feel about potentially working for an underdog?”

I told him I spent all my savings on a Performa 6300CD, and then again on a PowerMac 8600. I got the job.

Sitting there on the east coast in a dirty dorm room with so much to learn, reading Guy Kawasaki’s email newsletter, it seemed so ridiculous that I’d ever be an Apple Evangelist that I didn’t even bother dreaming about it. In retrospect, it seems obvious.

A month after announcing it, Samsung has begun advertising its Galaxy Gear “smartwatch” on television. The first ad features clips from various movies and TV shows of people talking into and tinkering with watches that were more than just watches. It concludes with a shot of someone using a Galaxy Gear. The implication was that we now finally live in the future, thanks to Samsung.

Many people immediately noted that the ad was reminiscent of Apple’s original 2007 ad for the iPhone, titled simply “Hello.” The easy thing to say here is that this is just another instance of Samsung aping Apple. It’s a reasonable charge, but it’s also lazy.  These ads are alike in appearance and nothing more.

First, it’s only fair to point out that the “Hello” ad is not typical Apple advertising. Apple’s ads are historically plain, to the point, and focused entirely around the product itself. In “Hello”, we see the product for a split second, after a barrage of licensed content with no connection to Apple or Apple products. There’s a reason for that departure, which also must be noted, because Samsung clearly did not.

The “Hello” ad worked on a number of levels:

1. It was a playful introduction to the product
2. It set very low but still very real expectations to build perspective
3. It clearly demonstrated progress in technology and design

The message behind “Hello”, and its distinction from the usual Apple product advertisements, was and still is clear: You are not ready for this, so we need to formally introduce you.

The iPhone dramatically tore down our understanding of everything that preceded it: phones; computers; software; the Internet; how we consume information; how we communicate; how we are (not) beholden to gigantic infrastructure companies that basically hate us. It’s all done differently now. The Way Things Are was about to become The Way Things Were. So, “Hello.”

The Galaxy Gear ad, and the Galaxy Gear itself, convey none of this. The ad primes us with decades of fantastic expectations — expectations which just about any review of the product you can find will tell you have not been met. It also implicitly, and very ironically, shows just how lacking in vision the product itself is. The iPhone ad says, “We’re starting over.” The Gear ad says, “We tried to make that exact thing you’ve seen on TV all these years.”

One of the common cheapshots following the Gear announcement back in September was “This is what we get when Samsung doesn’t have anything to copy.” This new ad is Samsung’s reply. “I beg your pardon, we absolutely copied!” It demonstrates not just a lack of creativity in the product, but also a complete lack of awareness in its marketing.

This all stands just the same whether or not you think the TV spot is actually derivative. The problem with this ad is not that it’s ripping anyone off. The problem with this ad is that it exhibits everything wrong with Samsung as a company.

TechCrunch has relayed a new NPD report tracking “market share” in the fourth quarter of 2011. It shows a “market share” of 43% for iOS to 47% for Android. I put “market share” in quotes because it’s listed as “smartphone” market share, and it’s not clear whether or not iPod touch and iPad, or the various Android tablets, are (or should be) included.

What interests me much more is the by-model breakdown of sales according to NPD. There are currently three iPhone models available — iPhone 4S ($199), iPhone 4 ($99), and iPhone 3GS (free) — and they occupy the top three slots in that order. This may not be an entirely new phenomenon, particularly not for Apple products, but I still find it remarkable. It contradicts what most people keep insisting is conventional wisdom: that cheap and/or free models will always steal volume from premium models. Despite price and variety pressure from various Android models, and even pricing pressure from other iPhone models running the same exact software, the iPhone 4S was still the top-selling smartphone in the United States (according to NPD, at least). And this report is only for October and November — it doesn’t include Christmas.

You can’t explain this with the usual hand wave of “marketing.” If people are opening their wallets for Siri because of the latest commercials, for example, it doesn’t explain why the iPhone 4, without Siri and $99 more than the free 3GS, is #2. At face value, I wouldn’t think Siri is worth $200 to the average consumer, and I definitely wouldn’t think “speed and a Retina display” are worth $99 to them. Surely Apple Retail staffers are pushing the higher-end models, but I still think the average person will gravitate towards free, especially if nearly all the features are there. (Related: my parents now own an iPhone 4 and an iPhone 4S. I had very little to do with it.)

Even though the 3GS finished “last” among the iPhones, it still outscores any individual Android model, which is again remarkable to me. And it shows that despite what many Apple observers like to say, Apple does in fact care about market share — at least for now. I can’t imagine Apple looks forward to qualifying and performance testing new software releases on two-year-old hardware that isn’t significantly improving the bottom line, but that’s what’s happening. (At the moment, iOS 5.0.1  still performs very well on my old 3GS). More than one high-up person has decided that moving these units at any cost is a current priority. The impact on the user base, and the psychological impact of three iPhones on top instead of two, are apparently worth the trouble.

Apple has published a surprisingly frank Xserve obituary:

Since its introduction in the fall of 2009, Mac mini with Snow Leopard Server has become Apple’s most popular server system.

People have been using Mac mini as a server since the original was released. There was a time when Apple might have shunned this sort of “unintended” use, but they straight up embraced it last year with the release of Snow Leopard. I’d be very interested to see how many Mac mini sales are actually server bundles. Great opportunity to recall Microsoft’s famous Mac mini test wall.

Apple’s never been in the big-iron commercial server business, but Xserve racks are not uncommon in higher ed research labs. Apple must be confident that those customers won’t be deterred by the Mac Pro form factor (or the mini’s performance).

The move is a testament to Apple’s constant reinvention, even at the height of its success. Forget last month’s earnings call; trim the fat.

(Matt Gemmell)